Page 6 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

I opened my eyes. A jagged stone ceiling spread above me, glowing softly with swirls of alien growth.

I hadn’t imagined the nightmare. It happened.

I stared at the ceiling for a long breath and checked my watch. The digital skin was dark, with a spiderweb of cracks across it. Must’ve happened when I smashed into that rimstone after the blast.

Lying here would accomplish nothing. I had to get out of this hellhole.

I sat up slowly. The generator was still going, and three of the five floodlights had survived, illuminating the cavern with bright puddles of electric light.

The inside of my head burned, my back throbbed, and my right leg felt like someone had rolled an asphalt compactor over it. But I was still breathing.

“Is anyone alive?”

Silence. Just me and the corpses.

“Anyone?”

Something nudged my side. I whipped around. Bear sat next to me, her smart brown eyes focused on my face with unwavering canine intensity.

I wasn’t by myself. The dog was with me.

“Hi Bear.”

Bear tilted her head. Her left side was dark and wet. Blood. It started near her shoulder and bled down over her leg onto the paw. Shit.

“Hold on, girl.”

I pushed to my feet. My right leg trembled but held my weight. Oh good. I took two steps before I remembered the bone sticking through my skin.

I pulled my right pant leg up. An angry red welt marked my calf, smudged with dried blood. That was it. The wound was gone.

I’m losing my mind.

My leg was broken. I had looked at it and then hid it with my coveralls. The pant leg was stained with dark red, the result of a massive bleed. I’d left a blood trail across half of this cavern. I looked up. There it was, a ragged chain of dark smears.

I felt the edge of rising panic and shoved those thoughts right down before they dragged me under. It didn’t matter right now. I had to see what was going on with Bear’s shoulder.

I made my way to the nearest pond. An indigo hard hat lay on the rocks. I had a sick feeling that Stella might have been wearing it.

Nope, not going to think about that either.

“Come here, Bear.”

The shepherd padded over.

“Stay.”

Bear looked at me. All the commands Stella gave her were in German, and I could only remember a couple. The word for stay wasn’t one of them.

“Stay.”

Bear sat.

Good enough.

I needed to clean the blood off her, but who knew what the hell was in this water.

I flexed .

The water looked perfectly clear to my enhanced vision.

My talent pegged it as clean, but there were limits to what I could sense.

If Bear had an open wound, and I dumped a bunch of alien bacteria into it…

But then I crawled all over in that water with an open wound – which was mysteriously not open anymore, and yeah, not thinking about that – and I almost drowned in it.

I was pretty sure I’d swallowed a bunch of it.

Which was neither here nor there, except if there was some vicious pathogen in it, we were both fucked.

There was water in the canteens. All miners carried some. We would have to save that for drinking. There was no way to tell how long it would take us to get out of this cave.

Suddenly my mouth was dry.

I dipped the hat into the stream, scooped some water, and gently poured it over Bear’s flank, half-expecting the dog to bolt. Bear sat like a rock.

“Stay. What a good girl. The best girl. So good.”

Three hats later, the water ran mostly clear. A gash carved Bear’s skin over her shoulder. It was shallow and not too long. Most of the blood must have come from somewhere else. Someone else.

I exhaled. One of those carts should have a med kit on it.

“Let’s get some antiseptic on that.”

I needed to get across the stream and the slight wobble in my leg said that if I fell, I would regret it. The best place to cross was still the same – the shallow part where Aaron lay in two pieces.

I picked up Bear’s leash and made my way to the crossing. If she yanked me off my feet, there would be hell to pay. I waded into the stream, ready to drop the leash at the slightest tug. Bear whined and followed me. I slowly shuffled across the stream bottom.

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

The words came out like a curse. Melissa’s face was branded into my memory. I could replay it in my head like a recording. Six years. I couldn’t even remember how many breaches together. She knew my children’s names. She looked straight at me and yelled at London to throw the grenade.

“I thought she was my friend, Bear.”

Bear didn’t answer.

“I saw Melissa push Anja out of her way. And that over there is Anja’s body. She was twenty-six years old.”

Sanders, Hotchkins, Ella Gazarian, they were in front of me when I was sprinting for that exit. My memory served up Sanders being swept away by the blast.

“They were her guildmates. They trusted her, and she fucking left them, and worse, trampled over them trying to escape. Sanders is probably the reason I survived. He took the brunt of that aetherium grenade.”

We cleared the stream and carefully went up the shallow slope to where the carts waited. Water sloshed in my boot. The other one was wet, too.

I tied the leash to the cart, found the first aid kit, and flipped the heavy latches open. A nice big bottle of antiseptic rinse. We were in business.

“Stay, Bear.”

The shepherd sat again.

I opened the antiseptic and poured it over the wound. Bear shook but stayed.

“You are so good. Such a good dog.”

I capped the bottle and grabbed a tube of antibacterial gel.

“Melissa’s priority was the mining crew. But London’s priority was keeping everyone safe, and if that failed, keeping me alive. He was in charge.”

I remembered the cold calculation in London’s eyes, too. The way his face iced over when he hurled the grenade. The set of his mouth. I squeezed the gel onto Bear’s wound.

“He was looking straight at me, and his eyes said, ‘Fuck you. I’m not dying here today.’ His shield lasts two minutes.

Two minutes, Bear! That man is fucking invulnerable with the shield up.

I was halfway across that stream when he bailed.

If he just activated his shield and waited ten seconds, I would’ve been on the other side of the cave-in.

The rest of the mining crew would’ve been on the other side with me. ”

Bear tilted her head, looking at me.

“The hostiles weren’t even paying attention to us.

They were fighting each other, and they cut us down because we were in their way.

We could’ve run all the way to the gate.

Even if the creatures had followed us, they couldn’t exit into our world.

They are trapped in the breach until the anchor gets enough energy to rip the gate open. ”

Bear tilted her head to the other side.

“You know what he said to me? He said, ‘I’ll get you out of here in one piece. The only way you go down is if I’m down, and I’m really good at surviving.’ Well, we know he didn’t lie. That asshole is excellent at surviving.”

I screwed the cap back onto the gel tube.

“The Cold Chaos assault teams are good at clearing the prospective mining sites before moving on. I’ve never seen their escorts deal with anything more serious than a skirmish.

The most London had to do was to cut down an occasional left-over creature popping out of its hiding place.

This – everything that happened – was the reason why Cold Chaos sent him into the breach.

When the worst-case scenario occurred, he was supposed to step in and that fucker. .. All those people…”

A sob choked me.

I shut up.

Being an escort captain came with a lot of responsibility, and you didn’t just become one.

It wasn’t enough to be powerful or trusted.

The position required experience. London had put in years with the primary assault teams. He was seasoned.

He looked at those hostiles slicing people like they were weeds in passing, and in a split second he knew that he had never encountered anything like them and nothing he had in his arsenal could stop them.

He saw death, and he made a deliberate choice to save himself.

He could’ve waited. He could’ve stood in that gap with his invulnerable warden shield up and let the rest of us escape, but it was a risk, and he chose his life over ours.

The only reason Melissa made it out was because she happened to be close enough and he would need a witness to back up his story.

When your job is to put yourself between noncombatants and danger, coming out of the breach alone wasn’t a good look.

Even if they fired him, he would live. That’s all that mattered to him.

And if he had been one of the ordinary miners, I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but he wasn’t a miner.

He was a high-ranking combat Talent. We trusted him.

I trusted him, and he threw an aetherium grenade in our faces and ran.

“When death stares people in the face, they revert to their true self, Bear.”

London’s true self was a cold, calculating coward.

I checked myself for scrapes and bruises.

I didn’t find any. I had some red welts here and there but no broken skin.

I’d crawled on my hands and knees across a rough cave floor dragging my broken leg behind me.

My hands and knees should’ve been raw, but I didn’t find any abrasions.

I rubbed some gel over the red mark on my leg just in case.

Don’t think about it. That was best.

The generator was next. The industrial model was rated for seven to nine hours run time. The fuel indicator was almost empty. I’d been in this cave for at least seven hours.